Corporate sensitivity did not begin in the Twittersphere or in the boardroom. It was born amid the intellectual ferment of the smoky coffeehouses of early-twentieth-century Vienna. The first sensitivity workshops resembled a radical therapeutic theatre that courted conflict (instead of mitigating it) and urged participants to voice their raw fears, biases, and emotions. The rise of corporate sensitivity is a story of how this shattering of social conventions (called “unfreezing” by early practitioners) ended up as PowerPoint presentations and team-building exercises for contemporary office workers.
It was in the same artists’ circles frequented by Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Gustav Klimt, and a young Peter Lorre that Jacob Levy Moreno, an editor of an expressionist magazine, planted the foundations of sensitivity training. Born to a Sephardic Jewish family, Moreno grew up in Vienna and became interested in group reconciliation as a student at the University of Vienna, where he attempted to mediate disputes between nationalist and Zionist student factions. Moreno’s subsequent witnessing of the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism only intensified his commitment to exchange and reconciliation. The existentialist writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche served as inspiration for his “religion of the encounter”: a philosophy premised upon a spiritual faith in the transcendent possibilities of authentic, face-to-face human contact. He distinguished his approach from the Freudianism that was popular at the time by advocating “acting” in the place of psychoanalytic talking, and emphasizing the “here and now” rather than past traumas and repressions.
Moreno’s idiosyncratic, mystical philosophy can best be conveyed through a poem of his, from 1914, which became the “prayer” of his psychodramatic method:
A meeting of two: eye to eye, face to face.And when you are near I will tear your eyes outand place them instead of mine,and you will tear my eyes outand will place them instead of yours,then I will look at you with your eyesand you will look at me with mine.
This startlingly graphic poem is not the best advertisement for Moreno’s literary credentials, but its avant-garde energies may be better appreciated when compared to the young Stephen Dedalus’s chant in James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” first serialized the same year as Moreno’s incantation: “Apologise, / pull out his eyes, / pull out his eyes, / apologise.”
Though Moreno’s language was quirky, the group-therapy techniques that he pioneered were legitimate: role-playing, for instance, and the use of spontaneous interactions (or what today we’d call improv). Above all, his argument that people “can be made to be the crucial experts and investigators of any social setting of which they are a part” would become pivotal to the sensitivity-training methods that he exported to the United States.